Singleness and the world of 'not belonging'

The repertoires about single women are unequivocal: without a
husband and children, single women signify ‘lack’ - they are incomplete and therefore
do not belong. 'Gender' and 'space' are both embodied experiences.

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Singleness. Image: pixabay.com

Let me begin with a story, which is set in
urban middle-class Sri Lanka.

It had been six years since Ruwanthi (36)
had left her violent and alcoholic husband after enduring five years of severe
psychological and physical abuse. When I
met her, Ruwanthi was living with her older sister’s family who had offered her
refuge, reluctantly at first, after she could not “drag this along [sic]
anymore”. She now had a full-time job
at a Montessori and she also baked cakes to supplement her income. Ruwanthi presented herself as a resourceful
person who her extended family, as well as friends, relied on especially in the
organisation of events such as a birthday party or wedding. Yet, her
life-history was redolent of a sense of being ‘out of place’. Two moments in Ruwanthi’s narrative stood
out. Ruwanthi told me:

“I love going on
trips […] When my family plans them I am always the one organising […] and
coordinating […] When I stop and look around, however, I feel so alone. Then I
think, ‘if [my husband] were here, at least I would not be alone. I would
belong somewhere.’ Everyone has someone. The children will play together, my
mother will chat with my aunts […] I feel like I am drifting […] It’s a strange
thing. Everyone needs me. I am the first to be called when there is a party or
a funeral. I do all the running around. I
am always in the kitchen helping out. I feel odd when I am doing nothing."

The marginality Ruwanthi conveys here is
visceral—an emotional response to the deep-rooted cultural expectation that a
woman’s identity, status, and sense of belonging depend on her being
married. Later, Ruwanthi’s narrative
illustrated the deeply corporal dimension of her marginality when she described
her living arrangements. Her sister and
brother-in-law lived in a small three-bedroom house. They occupied the main
room, their teenaged daughter shared a room with her grandmother, and the third
room belonged to their adolescent son. Ruwanthi slept in the landing upstairs
where the TV was installed.

"Sometimes I crave
a nap […] Just a few minutes when I have had a difficult day. I have to wait
until everyone goes to sleep before I can even shower and change. If there is a [cricket] match, my brother-in-law
watches TV till late […] If my niece is studying she will ask me to lie down on
her bed, but I don’t like to impose […] I shouldn’t be ungrateful. They took me
in. So, I am careful. I wait for
everyone to finish their dinner before I start my cake orders […] I don’t want
my sister feeling like I am invading her kitchen. I don’t want anyone to feel I
am in their way."

Ruwanthi’s narrative powerfully evokes how
marginality is a deeply embodied experience.
That Ruwanthi cannot fully occupy the space that she calls ‘home’, that
she must continuously negotiate where she places her body in relation to others
goes beyond a metaphysical experience.

The theory

Feminists have highlighted how ‘single
women’ as a category continues to be regarded as a ‘problem’ that must be
rectified. Psychologists Jill Reynolds and Margaret Wetherell (2003), for example,
illustrate how the notion of singleness as a ‘deficit identity’ has a powerful
influence over how single women present themselves: justifying their decision
to be single, and claiming meaning and their life’s worth as originating outside
of marriage. Anthea Taylor
(2012)
argues that single women are ‘pathologised’: their independence and autonomy
often read as a poor ‘trade-off’ to marriage and family. In Sri Lanka, as in other parts of South Asia and
elsewhere, the ideal of companionate marriage—imagined as a union of two
persons and based on intimacy and pleasure—amplifies the marginalisation of
single women. The repertoires about single women are unequivocal: without a
husband and children, single women signify ‘lack’—they are incomplete and, therefore,
do not belong.

Facebook generation, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Image Asha L.Abeyasekera.

The feminist discourse about gender and
space in South Asia (and beyond) has tended to focus on women’s access to
public space. Issues of women’s safety and security are central to these
dialogues. It is explicit in the discussions about women’s mobility: the
experience of sexual harassment on public transport and the imminent risk of
sexual assault on the streets as women move between ‘the home and the
world’. It is also implicit in the debates
on women’s equality in the workplace where sexual harassment precludes women
from fully enjoying the rights and privileges as their male counterparts. Sandya Hewamanne
(2003),
commenting on the experiences of young women working in the Free-Trade Zone in
Sri Lanka, argues that sexual harassment operates as a form of disciplining, a
way of communicating that women do not belong in the public domain without
familial guardianship.

The idea that gender identities are
relational—that they are constituted in and through our engagements with the social
world—is now academic commonplace. Equally commonplace is the
reconceptualization of space as relational. Feminist political geographers like
Doreen Massey
(2004)
and Shilpa Ranade
(2007)
have argued that social space is not a neutral backdrop against which social
relations are enacted, but that gender relations are constituted by
socio-spatial constructs.

For Ruwanthi these seemingly clichéd ideas
in feminist theory about gender identity and gendered space become deeply
salient in the way she feels she does not belong—not on her family trip, not at
social events, and certainly not at home.
Her life not only exemplifies how ‘singleness’ is a marginal identity
and status, but her experience as a single woman is rooted in how she can
inhabit space in the intimate sphere of kinship and family. Ruwanthi is
accommodated by her family, but tolerance comes with an extraordinary price: her
invisibility. She must be ‘inconspicuous’—and
what this means in terms of her behaviour is very much about how and when Ruwanthi
can occupy space. The spatial dimension
of Ruwanthi’s marginality as a single woman—her sense of ‘not belonging’—brought
home to me what feminists mean when they claim that ‘gender’ and ‘space’ are
both embodied experiences.

Belonging

The ‘gender and space project’ conducted in
Mumbai focused on how men and women “locate
themselves in and move through public space in their everyday negotiation of
space” (Ranade 2007). The findings offer critical insight to my discussion
about single women’s sense of belonging as an embodied experience. The study
calls for a radical shift in the debates about ‘gender and space’ from the
realm of ‘danger and safety’ to that of ‘risk and pleasure’. Shilpa Phadke
(2007)
points out that “that even the most desirable of urban subjects [i.e., middle-class
women] are offered only conditional access to [public] spaces (p.1510). Shilpa
Ranade
(2007) argues that by focusing on women’s safety, the debates ignore how women
are denied the pleasure of ‘loitering’, i.e., occupying public spaces as men do
when ‘hanging out’ or ‘gazing at
others’. She asserts that ‘loitering’ is
a ‘male privilege’, claiming that “women can access public space legitimately
only when they can manufacture a sense of purpose for being there” (my
emphasis).

The idea that women must
justify their occupation of public space speaks to Ruwanthi’s experiences in
the intimate sphere. Ruwanthi, sans
marriage and children, must justify her place in her family by helping out at
family events. When she’s not doing
anything useful—in the evenings after work—Ruwanthi must be invisible. Like the
millions of women on the streets and in offices, Ruwanthi as a single woman can
belong only if she has a purpose.

My conversation with Ruwanthi was an extraordinary
moment in which an abstract theory became crystallised in a respondent’s
narrative: the feminist concept of gendered space. As Doreen Massey (1995) observes, “things
are more easily said than understood or thought through into practice”.

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